Top US paper tells Facebook what it should do about its 'face problem'
It's enough to give you the creeps. The Los Angeles Times is not talking about George Orwell's 1984 however - the subject instead is what Facebook is doing with your photos.
"In the contemporary version, it's a seemingly ubiquitous Internet company vacuuming up personal information to build profits." Like, say, Facebook.
In what the Times call "its latest privacy intrusion, " Facebook it says "has built a gargantuan photo collection of the faces of Facebook users — and non-users."
At the moment, the database and facial recognition software is only being used to help users identify the people in the snapshots they upload to Facebook.
"Nevertheless, it's just the kind of repurposing of personal information that companies should obtain users' permission for — a step that companies don't like to take because it results in fewer people participating."


Facebook has long encouraged users to add digital tags identifying the people in the pictures they upload, says the paper.
"What it didn't tell users was that it was using that information to build a database of facial images. Late last year it started using this database to identify people automatically, although the person uploading the photo still had to confirm the tag.
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One concern is what Facebook may eventually do with its growing collection of facial images — for example, how it might make the technology available to advertisers, or how it would respond to subpoenas."
Facebook had issued a partial mea culpa, the leader writer notes, saying it should have given users a clearer heads-up when automatic identification was enabled.
What it really should have done, says the Times, was ask them to opt in instead of merely, quietly, giving them a way out.